


Where There's Tears

by Papapaldi



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Reunion, author chooses to ignore moffat's copout, freaky lesbian space puddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:27:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22418476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: When the Doctor answered Yaz’s call, it didn’t take her long to work out what she was talking about. A girl made out of a puddle, speaking borrowed words – and appearing at two different places in the same city within a matter of minutes – she only knew one creature like that. Heather. The Doctor knew why her old pal of an oil puddle was back. There was only one reason it could be. Bill Potts. But, as she would have to tell her, Bill Potts was dead, and it was her fault.The fam are paid a visit by a very spooky girl made of water, and the Doctor is given the chance to reunite with a friend she barely had time to grieve – though not in the way she had hoped.
Relationships: Heather (Doctor Who: The Pilot)/Bill Potts, Thirteenth Doctor & Bill Potts, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Twelfth Doctor & Bill Potts
Comments: 43
Kudos: 293





	1. What, in the end, are any of us looking for?

**Author's Note:**

> I've chosen to ignore that one line in TDF when Heather says she could make Bill human again because it's "all just atoms." No! I don't like that Mr Moffat! Total copout, give me angst. Give me a creature who isn't quite human, but who longs to communicate with an old friend.
> 
> Alsooo, this story is set between series 11 and 12, because once series 12 comes around there's far too much angst and angry Doctor for this to reasonably happen.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [](https://ibb.co/rfqcVW1)

The pilot flew. It was aimless, crewless. Boundless. It was engineered to transcend space and time, to dart between its many channels in a stream of flowing particles. It was made to follow orders. 

It had a crew, once, and a family. It had been part of a larger mind, like a drop in a vast ocean – but it had fallen out. Leaked. Left behind. The fuel only knew two things; how to follow orders, and how to fly. It had no one, and it needed a crew – but first – a pilot. 

She came again and again – the girl with a star in her eye and a blooming hurt in her soul. She had one desire. One directive. To leave. She wanted to fly – and it knew how. 

When it met her, melded her, took her, it took her desires into it. The pilot  _ wanted  _ to fly. Suddenly, the universe was a beautiful place, despite the fact that it hadn’t been engineered to think such things. One couldn’t spend so much time amongst the stars and not find it beautiful. But, the pilot had orders, and it knew how to follow them. It wouldn’t leave. That was it’s primary directive. It – she – wouldn’t leave Bill Potts. 

But Bill Potts released her – and the pilot was sad, despite the fact that it hadn’t been engineered for such things. It – she – felt sad. She felt tears. 

Though she travelled through space and time and all its infinite channels – her mind endeavoured to wander back to Bill Potts. Until she received another order. 

_ Promise you won’t get me killed.  _

It wasn’t directed at her, and it wasn’t entirely clear in its wording, either, but she – the pilot, and not simply the fuel – remembered how to interpret the implicit meanings of strange organic languages. She knew that Bill meant  _ don’t let me die,  _ and so, she wouldn’t. 

It saddened her greatly to see the human girl transformed into something so grotesque. A machine beating in place of a heart – and the rest of her, ground up into mince and cast aside. The important parts picked through; pickled and preserved, wound through with tubes and gears and wires and electric sparks. The mind, rifled through and laced with electrodes like a cage around the beauty of her soul. 

She fell where she stood, clasping at the fraying ends of her humanity, falling to sputtering metal knees in a graveyard of creatures that were once her kin, holding the corpse of a man she loved dearly, beginning to rage with yellow fire. It was sad, and it was beautiful. A great many things in the universe – she was coming to learn, as the pilot – were both. 

So the pilot took her on as her first passenger, another mind for her vast consciousness, split off from the clinically engineered amalgam that was once its home. It was new. It was love. It cried tears of joy from both of their eyes, tears of hope. 

...

The night shift in Sheffield. In other words, a night spent twiddling your thumbs in an idling car on the main street, ears perked up in anticipation for the crackle of radio static that might give you  _ something.  _ So far, no luck. Yaz was sitting in her Hallamshire Police vehicle, navy blue struck black in the night, shining silver from the slick of rain and the light of the moon. She had her elbows propped up on the dashboard, stifled under her neon-green vest with the heater cranked up to save her from the bitter night outside. Her chin sat in her hands, red marks pressing up into her skin and breath coming slow enough to creep dangerously towards unconsciousness. It wasn’t even a Friday or Saturday, when there were usually at least a few drunkards to herd about. There was nothing – and judging by the resolutely crackling radio – there wasn’t likely to be anything else. Three more hours. The rain beat steady, drowning out the static. Yaz closed her eyes and exhaled, letting her chin sink further into her palms. 

There was a slap of water against the window. Yaz’s eyes snapped open, to a flash of movement right beside her, which caused her to jump and clench her jaw painfully. A young woman stood outside her car, uncomfortably close to the window. Her hand was pressed up against the glass, rain streaming around her fingers. In the murky night, her skin shone pale grey. Her eyes were large, dark, and streaming eyeliner that mingled with the rain streaks running down her face. 

Yaz’s eyes widened in recognition of the situation. She looked scared, or possibly hurt. Scared and hurt and alone – just the sort of person she was supposed to help out. She flashed the drenched woman a warm smile and wound down the window. 

“Are you alright?” she asked. “Do you need help?” Her hair was plastered damp to her forehead, and great rivulets of water clung to her skin as they fell, giving her face the texture of wet, roiling cement. 

She tilted her head to one side and said, in a hollow, ringing voice, “need help?” she said it like a question, and without a hint of emotion. The woman backed away from the open window slowly, and so smoothly that she seemed to roll. She hung a few metres back, still staring with those dark, unblinking eyes. 

She was probably drugged, Yaz thought, or off her face on something. Never refusing when people needed help – that’s what she was all about. “Okay,” she placated. Calmy, slowly. “Do you need me to call someone for you? You don’t seem well – I could call you an ambulance,” she offered. She was beginning to feel useless just sitting there in the car while this girl was likely about to freeze to death in this cold, sopping wet as she was. She tilted her head, but didn’t speak. 

Yaz stepped out of the car. When she looked up, she found that the girl was standing even further back, pressed up against the washed-out red brick of the building behind her. Water pooled at her feet, and the orange glow of the streetlamps overhead caught alight on her form as if sparkling on the surface of a lake. Yaz pulled up her hood and blinked against the rain. “Would you like to come with me?” she asked, edging closer. “Did someone hurt you, or are you lost or,” she struggled to find something that the girl might cling to. She’d learnt about this sort of behaviour in her training – sometimes people went mute and unresponsive as a reaction to extreme trauma. “Do you need to see a Doctor?” 

“Need,” she murmured, in that same flat, deadened voice, “call the Doctor.” The way she spoke seemed almost like an echo – an imitation of snippets of Yaz’s tone. It filled her with unease, which she promptly put out of her mind. Needing help and never refusing. 

Yaz nodded hurriedly, “right, okay, I’ll just let the station know and I’ll get you an ambulance right away. Would you like to sit in the car?” the rain was beginning to let up, but it was awfully cold out, and the girl – Yaz saw – was only wearing a thin, sopping shirt and a pair of jeans. Dripping with water, just like the rest of her. The fabric seemed as thick and viscous – as oily – as her skin, as if it were all made up of the same substance. “Could you tell me your name?” she ventured, when the girl didn’t respond. Yaz didn’t go any closer, because she knew people in shock spooked easy – best to approach with caution, patience, and kindness. That was the best strategy for any scenario, she’d found. “I’m Yasmin Khan, you can call me Yaz, if you like.”

The girl’s lips curled slightly into a weak smile, and a fresh stream of water trickled from her mouth. Still dripping – exuding water, more like – and even stranger still, the rain had stopped. She spoke again. “Yaz,” speaking seemed a struggle for her, mouth shuddering around the shape of every word. “Call the Doctor.” 

And for the first time Yaz considered that she might mean another sort of doctor entirely. “Who are you,” she whispered. 

She thinned, the slick liquid that composed her gushing to the floor as her mouth, still smiling, uttered a final ghostly whisper. Disjointed words, borrowed from Yaz’s own mouth. “Someone lost.” 

…

From his very comfy spot, tucked under a blanket with a warm cuppa in front of the telly, Graham heard an almighty shriek from the bathroom. Shriek was the proper word for it too – high-pitched and warbling, magnified through the thin walls and the echoing tiles of the room itself. A proper wailing shriek from Ryan, his nineteen year old grandson.

Graham chuckled to himself and called; “you alright there son?” 

A moment later – the muffled sounds of the towel rail clanging against the tiles, the scuffle of fabric, and bare, bounding footsteps against the carpet – Ryan appeared before him, wrapped in a towel and dripping wet onto the carpet. 

“There’s someone in the bathroom,” he panted, broad chest heaving above the green bath towel around his waist. 

“You what?” Graham sniggered, eyeing his grandson with a raised, sceptical brow. “Come on mate, you’re drippin’ all over the carpet!” 

“Graham, seriously, I’m tellin’ you, there’s some girl standin’ in the bathroom. She was just standin’ in the corner of the bathtub while I was in the shower.”

He faltered for a moment, setting his mug of tea down on the table beside his chair. “It ain’t the Doc, is it?” he asked, because there had been a certain… incident, in which the Doctor had found herself, in her consistent and honestly impressive ignorance of social norms, in the bathroom while Graham was having a shower. (Hi Graham, where do you keep the – stop screamin’, it’s nothin’ I haven’t seen before) he shuddered at the thought. 

“No, definitely not. I didn’t get a good look but she had, like, afro hair.” 

“You sure?”

“Go and have a look if you don’t believe me!” 

“Not one of your mates playin’ a joke?” he asked as he stood up, slowly and stiffly, from his chair. 

Ryan shook his head and pointed the way down the hall, chest still heaving. Proper shaken. Outside the bathroom, the lights were flickering. Ominous. He didn’t like ominous. 

“Oi, anyone there?” he asked, putting himself in front of Ryan as he walked, just in case. “We don’t bite,” he added, cheerfully, “playin’ a prank are we? Walked into the wrong house?” He kept on talking to calm his mounting nerves. Nothing had happened yet to make him nervous, as such, but after a long time spent trailing after the Doctor, one got a sixth sense for sensing danger. Alien business. Either that or he was getting paranoid – which hanging around the Doctor was wont to do as well. A flash of light, and a figure appeared, silhouetted darkly against the far wall. 

“That’s her!” Ryan whispered unnecessarily. 

“You alright, love?” Graham called, moving slower now. A trail of water was streaming from the bathroom and out onto the carpet, soaking in deep enough to drench the fibres and run a rindle across it. 

“Our best mate’s a fed!” Ryan called, “so don’t try anythin’”

Graham nudged him. “Not helpin’ son.” 

Ryan’s eyes widened, his astonishment aimed towards the figure of the woman. Following his shock, Graham saw that she was hovering along the ground – feet no longer solid, but transformed into bubbling eddies of water, clinging to the carpet and congealing into a solid mass. She held out a shuddering arm, and the flashing of the bathroom lights alongside cast her face in a stark white glare. Large, bulging eyes, ringed black and coloured blacker. Dead. No life behind those eyes at all – just a reflection swimming on the surface of the water. 

“So, I’m thinkin’ alien, yeah?” Ryan gasped. 

“Yeah, I’m thinkin’ you’re right,” Graham answered, backing away. 

“Our other best mate’s the Doctor!” Ryan called, in a far shakier attempt at intimidation. 

This time, Graham joined in as both of them hastened away from the encroaching figure. “Yeah, that’s right – so if this is alien business, you’d best watch out!”

They reached the end of the hallway, and still the figure approached. There was something non-threatening in her movements – a longing in her eyes, instead of malice. Another thing you got good at when hanging around the Doctor, was telling the difference. She wasn’t moving as quickly anymore, and her hand was outstretched with fingers soft, offering, not sharp and clawing. Not aggressive. Her mouth lolled open, lips quivering as if trying to form words. “Don’t bite,” she said, voice reedy and hollow. She stopped moving towards them and simply stood, drenching the carpet with the water that streamed from her skin and the sopping denim she was clothed in. A smile crept across her face, again causing her lips to quiver with the effort. “Best mate’s the Doctor.” 

“I think she’s copyin’ you Grandad,” Ryan gaped, nudging Graham with his bare shoulder, an incredulous smile on his face. 

“Are you alien?” Graham asked. He spoke slowly and loudly, as if communicating with someone old and hard of hearing. 

“Alien?” she repeated, mimicking Graham’s questioning tone. 

“Ok son, we are out of our depth,” Graham sighed, turning up to face Ryan.

“We need to call the Doctor,” he agreed. 

The drenched alien girl flung out her hand with such speed that both Ryan and Graham jumped back against the wall. Her eyes were even wider now, and her smile teetered off the edge of wan and creepy, right over into something that could be called bright. Her voice seemed almost solid, almost human, when she said; “call the Doctor.” 

“Right,” Graham nodded, “doin’ that – Ryan,” he prompted, but just as Ryan was about to run and grab his phone from the kitchen, the landline started to ring. With a glance quickly exchanged between them, Ryan dashed out into the kitchen to answer. 

Graham cast a hurried, apologetic smile to the wet alien and followed him. 

“It’s Yaz,” Ryan said, clutching his phone in one hand and his towel to his waist in the other. “Says she just saw a girl turn into a puddle that told her to call the Doctor.” 

“Right, so we’re bein’ haunted by puddle aliens,” Graham nodded, resolute. Not even surprised, at this point. “Guess we’re callin’ an alien of our own.” 

**...**

The Doctor never knew what saved him from the Mondassian cybership. He remembered being carried in cold, metal hands. Rubber arms, metal plated, grated with mud and singed by laser fire, holding him as love exuded from a mind so incredibly strong. Fighting back against mathematically engineered corruption. Bill Potts.  _ (I am Bill Potts)  _ the mechanical voice echoed, a terror from his past, made from the remains of his friend. What was it the Master had said – friend inside the enemy, enemy inside the friend. The Master. Missy. He thought he had seen conflict in her eyes as she had turned away, leaving him, following the destructive wake of her past – quite literally – as it sauntered through the forest. It must have been wishful thinking on his part. That was him, always. Wishful thinking. Always seeing the good in people even when there wasn’t a shred of it to focus on, nothing to outweigh the bad but a bias and an old crush. And now, Bill Potts was dead. 

_ I waited.  _ He always made them wait, always ruined their lives. Whether he dropped them back on Earth or dropped them straight into their graves, they were always waiting.  _ I waited for you.  _

He remembered being carried by Bill Potts, and so, he assumed, she found a way to get him back to the TARDIS. Maybe, if he’d been awake, he would have asked her to leave him there to die. She wouldn’t have listened, despite the promise he’d made, and broken.  _ Promise you won’t get me killed.  _

  
  


But it was her, Bill, who finally convinced him to get on with it – to stop sulking, to get off his stupid arse and be a Doctor. Just a memory, but memories, as he showed her, were awfully important. 

So when she fell to Earth – the new Doctor, born in the fire and hope of a new promise – she did it for her. 


	2. We're looking for someone

When the Doctor answered Yaz’s call, it didn’t take her long to work out what she was talking about. A girl made out of a puddle, speaking borrowed words and appearing at two different places within a matter of minutes – she only knew one creature like that. She told Yaz not to worry, and not to touch the water (which brought back a hail of terrifying memories), and that she would be there in a jif. 

Heather. The Doctor knew why her old pal of an oil puddle was back. There was only one reason it could be. Bill Potts. But, as she would have to tell her, Bill Potts was dead, and it was her fault. 

…

Yaz rushed over to the O’Brien/Sinclair residence as soon as she could, despite her shift being half through. She’d called Sunders to ask if she could hand in a little early, and to her surprise, he’d said yes. If she’d been anyone else, she suspected, he wouldn’t have dreamed of it, but she was his best probationary officer,  _ and _ she was great at playing the favourite. ( _ Night shift on a Wednesday, I see where you’re comin’ from, Yaz, _ he’d said,  _ just this once, okay?).  _ She would’ve done it anyway, no matter what he said. It wasn’t as if they could afford to lose her, and she wasn’t about to miss a run in with alien puddles just to sit about in a car for a few more hours. 

When she arrived, Ryan answered the door with a hopeful smile that faltered slightly when he saw she wasn’t the Doctor. 

“She’s not here yet, then?” she asked. 

“Err, no, no not yet. Sort of strange, seein’ as she’s got a time machine.”

“Probably readin’ up on puddle aliens – yours isn’t still here, is it?” she asked, craning her neck to glance over Ryan’s shoulder. 

“No, she left, sorta just,” and he mimed the action of water trickling with waggling fingers, “melted into the carpet. Graham’s sorta mad about it, because now the carpet’s all full of oil.”

“Huh, I noticed that too, actually.” She fished a small plastic jar – usually used to collect samples for drug tests – out of her vest pocket. As the puddle/alien/girl had melted into the pavement, she’d managed to scoop a bit into one of the jars that she’d hastily wrangled from the glove compartment. “Thought the Doctor might want a sample to analyse.” She flashed the jar in front of Ryan now, the tar-like liquid congealing within its confines. It wriggled from side to side, like something alive. Proper alien. 

Ryan wrinkled his nose in disgust. “See Yaz, that’s why you’re her favourite.”

“I know,” she beamed, clapping him on the shoulder as she sidled past. 

“Want some tea? Grahams doin’ some,” he called after her. 

“Graham’s always doin’ tea,” she chuckled, “but sure, if you’re offerin’.”

…

The Doctor wasn’t reading up on alien puddles. She wasn’t being late on purpose, either. She was crying. It wasn’t something she did a lot – at least, not in this body. Not yet. This body had far too much hope and glee and near-manic energy to leave much room for crying. Only here it was, all of it at once. Not nearly long enough, this go around, between one set of friends and the next. Bill and Nardole dead, and then her new best friends only a day after. Usually there was a prolonged brooding period – perhaps spent sitting on a cloud in Victorian London, or dashing across the universe and becoming something of a monster. It differed from face to face. This one coped by covering up, by smiling and lying and building – machines and friendships alike. Both delicate, and both to her design. Only here was Heather, and she was bothering her new best friends – two parts of time that were never meant to touch. She of all people knew how cataclysmic a thing like that could be; a crack – for all her secrets to come spilling through.  _ Not secrets _ , she reminded herself, just hidden truths. Just artful omissions. 

Only here was Bill, and the thought of her was cracking the Doctor in two. 

She was crying. Hunched over beneath the console floor as the ship blared melancholic blue from above. She was trying to stop, but the ship wasn’t making it any easier with her incessant grief, both minds resonating with each other, amplifying the signal. When the Doctor lost someone, the ship lost them too; the feeling of their footsteps and the sound of their voices. 

She had to stop crying before she met her friends, because when one is the Doctor, one tries one’s best to hide the damage. 

…

A grating, guttural wheezing wafted in through the windows, and three heads perked up at the sound. Ryan, Graham, and Yaz all turned, like clockwork, to the sound of the TARDIS materialising. Each of them loved the sound, for different reasons in their intricacies, but from a distance, all the same. It meant escape, and adrenaline, being important, loved, special and alive. It meant her, too, the Doctor – the impossibility of her kindness and energy. Her friendship  _ (Time and Relative Dimension in Space – it means life).  _

Yaz was the first to her feet. She ran out the front door and left it swinging on its hinges – out down the front steps where she used to play as a kid – straight to the intoxicating shade of what she had come to call TARDIS blue. Before she could knock, the Doctor swung the doors open and popped out, hair disheveled and eyes distinctly red. 

Yaz was breathless, beaming, loose hairs from her braids standing wild and defiant against the orange glare of the street-lamps. Her smile faltered at the sight of the Doctor and those puffy eyes, the red blood-shot bolts, the messy hair. 

“Yaz!” she cried, enthusiasm jarring in lieu of her expression. “Heard you’ve been having some trouble with puddles,” the Doctor grinned. 

“Err, yeah,” Yaz smiled, deciding that this wasn’t the best time to ask. Maybe she hadn’t been crying – maybe aliens didn’t cry at all. It was easier to think of her that way – as someone separate from them. Impossible. Infallible. “Here,” she offered up her sample of alien oil with a business-like efficacy, “I got a sample.” 

“You’re brilliant, you are,” said the Doctor, much to Yaz’s delight. “I already know what we’re dealin’ with, though.” She placed the jar in her pocket all the same. “Still, don’t know when I might be needin’ a bit of alien oil, so thanks Yaz.” 

“No problem,” she beamed. 

“So, what’s the go on the alien puddle?” Ryan asked, now coming up to the TARDIS doors with Graham, having taken the journey at a far more sensible, leisurely pace. 

“Well, not very excitin’, actually, the go is; inside the TARDIS.” The Doctor was panicked, which didn’t do anything to improve the haggard look of her red-rimmed eyes and flustered cheeks. 

“What – us?” Graham asked, ever sceptical. 

“She didn’t exactly seem hostile,” Yaz added.

“Just copyin’ us – like she were tryin’ to communicate,” says Ryan. 

“Sorry team, but I’ve met this particular puddle before, and I know what she’s after. It’s not a being – it’s sentient space fuel from the far distant future.” She captured their attention with her usual focussed gusto, the energy that came with explaining the weird and the wonderful. Flailing hands and firing tongue. Gushing admiration, even for the threatening. “It’s used to pilot ships through space and time – but this part of the fuel mind leaked off from the source and formed its own separate,  _ lonely _ consciousness.” That was the Doctor, sympathetic even for a puddle. “The being was waiting on Earth for a suitable host so it could build up its crew, and its mind. She was the first, the pilot. Her name was Heather, but I made sure it didn’t take anyone else.” 

“But now she’s back?” Ryan prompted. 

The Doctor nodded, solemn. “Now she’s back. I think maybe she’s looking for some new passengers to climb aboard.”

“But I don’t think she is,” Yaz argued – conversed, she would have said, but she could tell by the Doctor’s stance that ‘argued’ was the way she read it. Closed off, just a little. Face hardening. “What she said to me and the guys, was to call the Doctor.”

“Does she want you?” Ryan asked, horror-struck. 

“No, no, not me. Someone I know. Maybe she thinks I’ll lead her to them.” She gave her head a shake, as if spurring herself back into reality. “Right, but, in the TARDIS, like I said.” 

“Can’t we come?” Yaz pried. “We can –”

Her voice was cut off as a gasp took its place. The watery figure of the girl named Heather was rising up out of the asphalt. A thin, murky puddle rumbled, bubbling as it struggled to form her shape – black viscous oil and muddied rainwater merging into a wriggling mass. Glossy skin and sodden fabric knitted together in the greyish damp. 

“Wait, that’s a different one,” Ryan exclaimed, but his voice was lost on the Doctor, who immediately dashed forwards to face Heather, putting herself bodily between it and her three friends. 

“In the TARDIS,” she shouted, “NOW!” She didn’t often raise her voice, and there was something at the edge of it that Yaz didn’t like. If she turned around now, she suspected that fresh tears would be filling the Doctor’s eyes, struggling to escape under that furrowed brow. 

“We’re stayin, Doc,” said Graham, defiant. None of them moved any closer. 

…

The pilot and the passenger – their humble crew of two – travelled the universe freely and together and in love. It wasn’t the human sort of love – the one that the passenger remembered. There was no spark of fire in her gut, a rush of heat to her face, a creeping, contagious smile. She had no gut to light, nor face to flush, nor lips to grin – just atoms pulled up into an imitation of their shape. A mimicry of humanity. It was close enough for the passenger – because she remembered what it felt like to have nothing there at all. Wires weaving through tissue and tendon, holding the heap together like thread through fabric. Cold metal where warmth should have been. Even then, she’d pushed the feeling away to an uneasy backdrop – because her reality was too horrifying to face. In this new form, Heather comforted her, tried to heal some of that buried pain. They were one, and they were two – different states of entwinement, constantly in flux. That drop of fuel – abandoned, alone – relished in the beauty of their minds, became them, loved them. Were them. 

They streaked across the universe like stardust on the wind – strung along in channels of cosmic radiation, stepping the gaps between galaxies in a single stride, jumping between universes and timelines as if skipping over stones on a vast river. They danced across the Medusa Cascade and the Horsehead Nebula. They listened to the singing towers of Darillium and the long song of the Rings of Akhaten. They even visited a mighty empire crumbling in a universe of its own at the end of time. Horrors and wonders. Great teeming piles of good things and bad things. 

They knew more than just two things, now – flying and following orders – they knew how to want, to yearn, to love. They knew how to long for someone, how to miss them. The passenger saw - with those infinite eyes - a woman hurtling across the universe, running from grief, and keeping a promise. And she knew that she had to find her. 

...

“Heather,” the Doctor said, voice flat and cold. “Advanced sentient timonic fuel scrap such as yourself must have some sort of psychic ability, so I hardly have to tell you it’s me.”

Her mouth gapes and shudders, clumsy movements. Sentient oil was never engineered to speak with a human mouth – all those individual vocal chords, impossibly thin, resonating. The teeth and the tongue and the tones. So many moving parts, such complex machinery. It struggled to operate it, and at its best could only mimic sounds it had already observed. Cached. It was beautiful, though the Doctor could find beauty in almost anything. It adapted to new forms of sentience, of life. It mimicked, assimilated, copied, grew. Lived. She echoed, flat; “hardly have to tell.” 

The Doctor shook her head, tears coming back – to her horror – thick and hot and fast. Trailing down her face as freely as the water weaving Heather’s flesh. “She’s not here. Bill’s not here, I’m sorry.”

Heather tilted her head as if in curiosity. “Bill.” 

“She’s gone,” she gasped, “She died, I’m sorry. It was my fault,” and a lump caught in her throat, suffocating her, pushing heat up through her sinuses. “It was all my fault.” 

“Bill.” She repeated. Same tone, or lack thereof. 

“She’s not here, okay! She’s dead. She died on a Mondassian cybership a million light years away – alone and afraid and it was all my fault!” She shouted, letting anger burn, just a little. 

“She’s here.” A pause, because deviance from the echo caused her great strain, “Bill’s here.” 

“What?” Only as she blinked her tears away did the second figure become visible, a blur of water roiling up, rearing like a wave, rivulets weaving in and out, stitching her together from the substance cast silver under the moon, and gold beneath the streetlights. Bill Potts. 

But not Bill Potts. Bill Potts was dead. 

“Bill,” she whimpered. That was when her knees gave out, and behind her, Yaz launched forwards on instinct, only for Graham to old her back with a gentle hand. The Doctor knelt against the stone of the pavement, the light fabric of her coat fanned out around her, spotted blue with water-coloured stains against the wet. “Bill,” she said again, her turn to be the echo. She reached a trembling hand forwards to grasp at her – the sleeves of her denim jacket, her warm and gentle hands. Instead, they hung, shaking and hesitant, because reaching out would make it real – because all her hands would find was oil dripping like dirty black tar. Cold, dead. Despite herself, a smile crept into her expression, a slight tug of her lips. “You saved her,” she looked up at Heather, standing alongside. “You kept your promise.”  _ And what of mine?  _ She thought. What of the promise she made when Bill Potts admitted how hard it was to let him go? 

On quivering legs, the Doctor struggled to her feet. She faced her, trying to edit out the grey mask, the black ringed eyes, the water creeping across her flesh. She tried to see the girl that had sat across from his desk in that lonely study (because Nardole didn’t count, obviously) and reminded him so much of his smiling granddaughter. She’d pulled him out of a seventy year slump of honor and duty and oath-keeping – right back into old habits, old adventures. Being the Doctor, for the first time since he lost Clara – at the time just a ghost lurking between the gaps in his memories. She tried to see her, but it was difficult. 

“You kept your promise,” Bill echoed, in a voice that was so heartbreakingly close to sounding like her’s. Always bright, snarky, teasing, joyful, lovely. This voice was hollow, leaking whispers either side like a bad recording. A consciousness puppetting a mimicry of her flesh. 

“No,” she shook her head, turning away. “I’m sorry, I can’t. You’re not… you’re not –” 

Bill’s hand shot out in a splash of water and grasped her wrist. As the cold grip closed around her, the dark Sheffield night fell away to reveal a tapestry of colour. Nebulous clouds and spatters of stars – tendrils of greens and blues and deep pinks, spotted with silver and gold. Space, but more than just that – time. It was drawn out around them like a map. All causality and possibility etched into the black canvas with inks of starlight, layered sheets of the infinite universe stitched together like so many reels of vibrant fabric. 

In front of her, Bill was transformed by the light of the universe. Her skin glowed with rich, warm colour. Her eyes were bright, with a soul behind them, and her hair was raised up, the dry, soft texture returned. Bold, beautiful, and smiling. A proper simile, one with split lips and gleaming teeth. Sparkling eyes. 

“Incredible,” the Doctor whispered, eyes searching the illusion. 

“Incredible,” Bill smiled. Still echoing – though there was a hint of herself behind the gesture, as if confirming rather than repeating. Incredible. 

“Here,” the Doctor offered a hand, a wild and quite probably reckless idea coming to her. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Here,” Bill repeated. Again, more of a confirmation. 

The Doctor raised her fingers delicately to rest against the surface of Bill’s head – decidedly flesh, instead of raging water. “It’ll allow me to establish a psychic link – let us understand each other. We won’t have long,” she warned, fingers suspended in their hesitation. Wild. Reckless. But, like tears, risk necessitated hope. “It’s not your fault – it’s in your nature to grow, to assimilate. We aren’t meant to exist on the same plane of consciousness,” she said. Her tone was soft, bracing, pleading. Sorrowful. Approaching a cyberman cowering in the corner of a barn grasping at the gossamer-thin strands of its former mind, unspooling. “When I say so,” she said, stern, “you have to let me go.” 

Bill’s smile shifted slightly, turning up. “Go.” 

The Doctor nodded, exhaling deeply, closing her eyes. She pressed the pads of her fingers against Bill’s skin, brushing past strands of coiled, flyaway hair. 

A link was forged between them, stringing together two minds that were never meant to commune. Too dissimilar. A human would be converted into that writhing mass of conscious liquid in a moment of direct contact – but the Time Lord was denser in her composition. There was far more consciousness – more memories, experience, abilities, and dimensions – tucked away within her form. It had quite a lot more to chew. 

From the Sheffield streetside, beyond the stars and maps of time, three humans watched as water pooled at the Doctor’s fingertips. Her eyes were closed, her head inclined towards the ghost of a girl with hopeful tears in her eyes. 


	3. Who's looking for us

When the Doctor opened her eyes again, she found herself within an achingly familiar scene. A proud old study in a proud old building. St Luke’s University – where she,  _ he’d –  _ spent over seventy years as a professor. Ringing the room were polished shelves crammed with everything from great dusty tomes to paperback novellas – physics to poetry, and everything in between. Bill sat on the other side of the Doctor’s sturdy, polished desk. Upon it, a reminder – a pot of rejected screwdriver models, and photographs of people he’d lost, always judging. Bill was smiling – the same smile she flashed when there was something she didn’t quite understand. Something fascinating. Warm, white sunlight filtered in from the large window on one side of the room, illuminating the TARDIS doors to a washed-out navy, dust motes spiralling across its shape, caught in sun beams.

“Hey,” Bill smiled. No echo, no flattened tone. Just Bill; warm and ridged like worn wood – like the finish of the desk between them and the dusky smell of books. Alive. 

“Hey,” she said, a whimper creeping into the word. A word she thought she’d never get to say – not to her. Though, was she really saying it now? “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry –” once the words began, they didn’t stop. All those things left unsaid – the broken promises. Her head began to sink down towards the desk, lolling between elbows, the fabric of her coat hanging crumpled. “I promised I’d keep you safe and I let you die and I made you wait and I lied to you, I lied and I –”

“Doctor,” she chuckled, bemused, “shut up.” 

“What?”

“Everything you’re about to say –” and the Doctor was reminded of another farewell; a suffocating alleyway as the clock counted down to the raven’s flight. “– I already know.”

“Right,” the Doctor swallowed, all the things she’d been waiting to say crawling back down her throat, settling in unease. It was hard, though, to feel uneasy when Bill was standing before her, whole. Almost human. “Sorry.”

“Look,” she smirked, “I know I’m not supposed to say this but...  _ wow _ ,” at her exclamation, she chuckled softly, and the Doctor was reminded of so many nights spent on campus, eating fish and chips and laughing loud and brusque into the quiet dark. “I mean, this is a definite improvement on the other guy.” Bill eyed her up and down. “You are just gorgeous.”

“Oi!” she cried, mustering a bit of her old anger. Old indignation. That weathered scottish mask of lines. “No flirting, I’m against it!” she blustered, much to Bill’s amusement. “I am strictly off limits – hear me?” 

She continued to laugh at the besmirched expression on the Doctor’s face. “Yeah,” she gasped, “Time Lord and an alien puddle – never would’ve worked out.” Her laughing eyes met the Doctor’s, and the old professor laughed along with her. 

“This is amazing,” the Doctor sighed, staring into Bill’s new mind. Expansive, exhaustive – every star in every universe catalogued, its light witnessed. It’s beauty honored. “The way you see the universe, it’s almost like – well, it’s almost like the way I see it.” time and space and infinity. The turn of the earth and the slowly curling grasp of entropy. 

She gave a modest shrug. “Pretty brilliant isn’t it?” 

“But you’re…” she trailed off, biting her lip as she bit down the words. “You’re not –”

“What?” Bill leaned across the table and grinned, as if daring the Doctor to complete the sentence.  _ You’re not you,  _ her mind finished, all the same. Understanding streamed between the two beings in a way that transcended words alone. “Don’t sit there,  _ professor, _ ” she said the title almost mockingly, a mischievous glint in her eye, “and tell me you know every secret in the universe. Bill Potts died, I know that.” At her words, the Doctor slumped slightly, shoulders spilling over their sockets, hair hanging down. Everything about this body spoke in movement; theatrical, laid-bare. “I do,” Bill assured her, with a smile, “and that’s okay because she died – I died – from that very first gun blast. Shot my heart right out of my chest – doesn’t get much deader than that.” 

The Doctor smiled weakly despite the grisly subject, because Bill delivered it all with a smile. Bill Potts was always good at spinning stories – the words seemed to flow out of her unceasingly with a lilted, passionate inflection. She gave even the Doctor a run for her money when it came to talking and never stopping. She was doing the same thing now – rattling off a tale with vigor and a smile – the act of which reminded the Doctor of someone she was coming to know. Someone who spun stories in a similar manner, and had been born barely surfacing from the grief that was the loss of Bill. “Except I got myself a metal heart, and you still came after me. To you, I was still alive. There was still hope for me. Except then, well…” for once her words did fail her. The girl’s mind did the rest;  _ ground bone and plucked muscle, clinical white under the knife fusing metal with hot blasts of fire and pain, pain, pain.  _ “I was definitely dead then – but I wasn’t to you. I was just a dying mind fading out to that cold dark, but you kept believing. Now, admittedly, I’m made of oil instead of metal – but it’s the same mind. Memories, Doctor,” she paused, and fixed her gaze on her professor’s eyes, “they’re important.” 

“I know.” A mirage of glass kissing her cheek, letting her see, filling in the broken spaces of her memories as he decided to be born again. She sighed. “I know.” 

“It’s like,” she shrugged, casting her bright gaze up so that her dark eyes caught the false light streaking across the study, “regeneration,” she brought up her hands, moving them as she spoke. Again, familiar. Maybe it was the Doctor that was the echo. “Your entire body burns up in a moment, every cell just – bang! Gone. But you’re still you, you’re still him. Your mind works a little different, you’re seeing the universe out from behind a different set of eyes – but it’s still you doing the seeing.”

It still didn’t make sense, she couldn’t wrap her head around it. The fuel had been hostile, stealing lives from the Earth, warping them to its will and making them into something less than human. But here she was – and she felt so  _ real _ . Whether a life’s memory held in glass, or a dying consciousness swallowed and emulated by alien oil – memories were important. And the fuel had them all. 

She remembered how it felt to be new like that; falling, barely born. Perception without comprehension. Memories slowly returning to her newly-forged mind. Terrified, but hopeful. Ecstatic. The Doctor smiled. “Yeah, I suppose that makes sense.”

“I just wanted you to know that I’m still out here in the universe. I’m happy, I’m seeing,” she grinned, “incredible things.”

The Doctor didn’t answer. It was, in a way, what Bill had always wanted – to see more.  _ More,  _ the yearning was echoed in one Yasmin Khan, in all of them. An insatiable appetite for the wondrous. 

“I suppose my foster mum must think I ran off or something,” Bill mused, staring up into the recesses of the ceiling. The Doctor always forgot about the families – or, rather – found the families too difficult to deal with, when she had to be the bearer of bad news. She never did go back to Brian Willams. “In fact, seeing as you and I both went missing at the same time, she probably thinks we ran off together. You know, rich professor, young woman –”

“Shut up,” the Doctor chuckled, shaking her head, disgusted. 

“Just saying, it’s what they’ll think,” she smirked, hands raised in a placating gesture. “I wish I could tell her, though. I want her to know I didn’t just abandon her.”

“She thinks you’re dead,” the Doctor admitted, her turn to avoid Bill’s blaring gaze. “I sorted it all out once I got back to Earth – resignation papers for the university, messed with the police a bit. It’s official,” and she gave Bill a grim, half-smile, “you’re dead.” 

She smirked, all sadness and no snark. “I suppose that’s for the best. At least she knows. It’s not as if I could appear to her like this – I’d scare her to death.”

“I’m sorry,” again, the apology came pouring out. Empty words, in her opinion. She wondered how it must feel to be transformed into something so monstrous to the eyes of others. A ghost, unable even to speak, to comprehend linearity. She was monstrous – she was used to that feeling, it was being seen that way that she wasn’t used to. She had always endeavoured to hide behind a mask. 

“Please,” Bill assured, attention snapping back, along with the brightness. “I need you to know that I don’t blame you, not for a moment. Not for any of it.”

The Doctor frowned and cast her eyes down, stubborn. “You should.”

“God, you’re such an idiot,” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. Theatrical. Alive. “You’re the stupidest idiot ever.”

The Doctor smirked at the familiar insult. “And don’t you ever doubt it.”

“I’m glad you’re not alone,” a sad smile curled her lips, eyes glistening with something that might have been tears, or oil, breaking through her mind’s illusion. “You’ve got three – sure you can handle that many at once.”

“Oi,” she feigned indignance, “I’m doing just brilliantly. I shouldn’t have –” her face fell, voice growing quiet. “I shouldn’t have taken them with me. I did try to dissuade them, but I knew they’d never say no – they’re too nice! Not my fault there’s so many nice humans hangin’ about –”

“Doctor.” Bill cut her off again as the professor’s voice began to grow frantic, breath coming fast and light. “Don’t feel guilty, not about them or me. Not even for a second. I knew the risks, and so do they. It’s a privilege, travelling with you. It really is.” 

“I left you there all alone,” she despaired, “for  _ ten years.  _ I told you to wait and then they –”

“It was worth it. It really was worth every agonising month just for a moment with you in the TARDIS.” But that was the problem, the Doctor reflected, their willingness to throw everything away just for a glimpse of the cosmos. Just for a moment with her. “Besides,” Bill chuckled, “your evil boyfriend wasn’t half bad. We were pretty good mates, actually.” A moment of silence stretched between them; teacher and student, friend to friend. Alien to oil.

The Doctor opened her mouth in indignation, seemingly about to protest, then shut it again. Bill laughed. Loud and brusque into the quiet nothingness. 

Time passed slower there, in the connection feeding between two minds – but out there, the link was becoming more than psychic. The fuel did what it couldn’t help but do; assimilate, learn. Copy and discard. Two sorts of matter that were never meant to touch – lest one consume the other. They were running out of time – but the Doctor never was good at endings. 

...

“What’s she doing?” Ryan asked, eyeing the Doctor and the puddle girl skeptically. 

Yaz edged closer, curiosity getting the better of her. They’d watched, wondering, horrified, as the Doctor had sunk to her knees at the sight of the alien. Her voice had been muffled by tears and the sound of gushing water spattering the pavement. Yaz had wondered whether the Doctor had ordered them inside the TARDIS for their own protection or to stop them from seeing her like that. Crying – for the first time that Yaz had ever seen. Vulnerable. Distinctly human, and distinctly fallible. 

When the girl’s hand shot out at the Doctor, Yaz had almost charged right up to them, but Graham had held her back with a warning glare. The Doctor wasn’t trying to get away, but didn’t seem trapped either. They’d watched with guarded curiosity as the Doctor had reached up a purposeful hand to the alien’s temple and placed her fingertips there. Both sets of eyes closed, then, and now, the three humans watched as the Doctor’s other arm raised a hand in similarly graceful poise up to rest on the other side as well. Their faces were pulled close together, foreheads almost touching. The Doctor’s face was slick with oil runoff from the other being, puddles of it pooling at her fingertips where they touched their skin. 

“I think they might be… communicating.” Yaz murmured, now edging away from the TARDIS and towards the pair. This time, Graham didn’t put out a hand to stop her. It seemed that he, too, thought intervention to be a close course of action. 

Cautiously, Yaz poked her head around to the Doctor’s field of view. Her eyes were shut, and the tear tracks on her cheeks glistened white under the moon. The oil pooling by her outstretched fingers was creeping up across her skin, clinging to her in tendrils of liquid. It was enveloping her – Yaz realised – and not just her fingers; the Doctor’s forehead swam against the light with a slurrish texture, and at her feet, the blackened puddle on the asphalt crawled over her boots like a calm stream, rising. “Doctor!” she exclaimed, but the woman’s attention was drawn by something else. Her face, slickening with oil, spread into a smile. 

“What is it, love?” Graham called, alarmed. He and Ryan sidled up to assess the scene.

“Look, it’s like it’s turning her into one of them!” Yaz cried.

She reached out to grab the Doctor and tear her away from the alien’s grip just as Graham shouted “Yaz, don’t!” Too late, because she already had the Doctor by the shoulder, and she was already seeing stars. 

…

“Your friends are waiting for you,” Bill said, with a patient smile.

“I know,” she whispered. She’d meant to speak clearly, but her voice felt thin, strained. Choked up on old guilt, revisited. “Just a moment longer, please.”

Bill shook her head, sympathetic. The Doctor didn’t want sympathy – she wanted Bill back. This wasn’t fair. “You have to let me go.” 

A sob bubbled from her lips, pressed down, stifled. “I don’t want to.”

…

Ryan, Graham, and Yaz stood rooted to the Sheffield pavement, and stared out at the stars. They couldn’t see all of it – not like the Doctor could. The sheer vastness of time was only an inkling in the back of their minds, steadily growing, as the substance wrapped around their minds and began to understand them. A crew; a proper crew. Team TARDIS.

Yaz had her hands on the Doctor’s shoulders, and Ryan – immediately trying to help – had grabbed her forearm. Graham, ever worrying for his grandson, had a hand on his arm, a warning. Just one touch was enough to show them it all. The universe. In there somewhere, the Doctor, but she was hiding from them still. She’d retreated somewhere deeper. Always unreachable. They couldn’t pull away, couldn’t close their eyes. They wanted to travel; their restless hearts yearned for the adventure. They wanted to fly, and the pilot knew how. 

…

“You need to let me go,” Bill was repeating. Softer, kinder. The Doctor felt another presence pressing in upon her mind, a tight grip trembling against her shoulders. Ghostly hands. An officer’s strength. “They need you, and you need them.”

“I don’t want to leave you again,” the Doctor murmured, quiet, lame. Desperate. 

“I’ve got the whole universe now. You’ve got each other,” she smiled, and reached across the table, taking the Doctor’s hands in her own. For a moment, those hands were old again. Lined, gnarled, slender and knobbled in a familiar cold carve of white marble. Old man’s hands. They felt right in Bill’s grip. “I forgive you, for whatever it is you’re still blaming yourself for – I forgive you.” 

“Goodbye,” the Doctor said, reluctantly letting her grip slide out of the girl’s. Hands young again, and small. New. 

“Not goodbye. Say it like you’ll see me again.”

“Well then –” she grinned, getting to her feet behind the office desk, and looking down at the girl perched restlessly upon the chair opposite. A familiar scene – but one she’d never see again. “– see ya round.” 

...

The Doctor hit the pavement with a splash. Her hands and sleeves were drenched, as were her coattails – dipped in deep blue. Her boots were soaked and sopping black, and as she looked up, two figures were dissolving into pillars of churning water, slowly sinking to the ground. Soaking silver into the moonlit stone. Behind her, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz are sprawled on the ground themselves, groaning and struggling to their feet. Their memories of stars and time’s infinite chasm were fading to a distant imprint – a footprint on the beach, swept to the faintest indent. The implacable ambience of all things. 

“Urgh, what was that?” Graham groaned. The Doctor stayed laid back on the cold ground, staring up at the stars. Somewhere up there, Bill and Heather – both or neither or whatever it was that they had become – were travelling. Living. 

Ryan helped Graham to his feet, and Yaz sidled around to address the Doctor. “Are you okay?” she asked, reaching down an arm in offerance. 

The Doctor grinned and took it, leaning her weight on the girl as she pulled herself to her feet on trembling legs. They had – quite literally – been turning to liquid, after all. 

“Are they gone – the aliens?” Graham asked. All three of them formed a line in front of the TARDIS, impenetrable – that was, until she gave them some answers. 

“Were they tryin’ to turn you into a puddle?” added Ryan. 

“Right, yes to Graham,” she fired up, mustering some of her usual spry energy. “And a sort of to Ryan. Less tryin’ to turn me into a puddle, more ‘I gave ‘em no choice by forcing a psychic link between the two of us’.”

“Why the hell would you do that, then?” Graham cried. 

“We were talking,” she answered, as if that explained her reckless actions. 

“Did you know her?” Yaz piped up, looking hopefully at the Doctor with those wide, dark eyes. Sharp eyes. 

“Yeah, I did. She used to be a friend of mine – human, just as much as you are – but I lost her.”

“Because she got turned into a puddle,” Ryan nodded. Yaz nudged him in the ribs and shot him a look, jerking her head back towards the Doctor. 

“Err, no, actually. The puddle just sort of copied her consciousness – like a back up on a computer. Basically the same thing, though. All we are is memories, in a way.” Her gaze grew whimsical, in the way it sometimes did. Staring off into a distant past and even further distant emotions. Pain of the scope that her three humans could scarcely imagine. The Doctor sighed before returning her gaze to her friends, each in turn, pointed. “There’s a reason,” she said, gravely, “that I asked you to be sure. Bill – that girl – she died, horribly. What happened to her, just trust me when I say, it’s the worst thing you could ever imagine…” None of them pressed her for details, but the curiosity was still there, clamoring for the truth like grasping hands behind their eyes, hungry. Their thoughts screamed as much, but they were respectful in their silence. “She died, it was my fault, and I don’t want anythin’ like that to happen to you, but I can’t –” her voice broke, but she didn’t cry. She stifled a sob in her hand and cast her eyes down, avoiding theirs – sympathetic. She didn’t like the feeling of their minds reaching out and trying to hold her. Their thoughts stuffed to bursting with all that  _ sorry.  _ “I can’t promise that the same won’t happen to you.” 

“We were sure then,” Yaz said, first to break the silence, “and we’re sure now.” Always the first; eager, brilliant. Reckless. The first to run into danger, to follow the Doctor, to pull her back with those steadying hands on her shoulders. Heroism like that was likely to get her killed, but she always did pick the heroic types.

“Yeah, same. I know it’s dangerous, but I know you’ll always try your best,” said Ryan. “I mean, how many times have you saved our lives?”

“Too many,” Graham nodded sagely. “And I’m in too, Doc, no matter what. And, well,” he swallowed, pressing his mouth into a hard line. Sympathetic eyes, but more than shallow pity – pain of his own, behind them. “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

The Doctor merely pushed her lips together and nodded once, abrupt. Reluctant to move, lest tears start falling. She turned, lonely and hunched, and stepped into the TARDIS. Ryan, Graham, and Yaz exchanged a determind glance. They weren’t about to leave her alone after something like that. The Doctor slunk away, and her crew followed. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is all written (probably, unless I decide to add some) Still have to edit but I should be posting every couple days-ish (and the prodigal daughter will still be coming out! so sorry Other stans) 
> 
> Honestly, series 10 is my favourite series of Doctor Who. Ever. And Bill is probably my favourite companion?? Maybe?? I just really liked her dynamic with 12. Her death was probably the most horrible thing to happen to a companion, and as much as it would be nice for Heather to just *poof* put her back on Earth as a human, I think that's sort of a copout sooo forever alien space puddle it is (not that she would choose to become human again, necessarily – who would?)


End file.
